The Relationship Between Racial Prejudice and Cardiovascular Disease Mortality Risk at the State and County Level

Background Robust evidence shows that perceived discrimination among stigmatized groups is associated with negative health outcomes. However, little work has examined whether holding prejudiced attitudes toward others is associated with health risks for prejudiced individuals. Purpose The study is a test of the hypothesis that holding prejudicial attitudes has negative health implications for both the holders and targets of prejudicial attitudes. Methods The project connected data (2003–2015) at the state and county levels on average explicit and implicit prejudice held by White, Black, and Native American respondents from Project Implicit with data on cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality for White, Black, and Native American individuals from the CDC Wonder database. Separate analyses regressed implicit and explicit prejudice on CVD mortality risk for White, Black, and Native American individuals, respectively. Results At the state level, among White individuals, explicit prejudice toward Blacks (β = .431, p =.037) and implicit prejudice toward Native Americans (β = .283, p = .045) were positively associated with greater CVD mortality for Whites. At the county level, White individuals’ implicit prejudice toward Blacks (β =.081, p = .015) and Black individuals’ implicit prejudice toward Whites (β = −.066, p = .018) were associated with greater CVD mortality for Whites. Also, at the county-level, among Black individuals, higher implicit (β = −.133, p < .001) and explicit (β = −.176, p < .001) prejudice toward Whites predicted CVD mortality for Blacks. Moreover, explicit prejudice held by White individuals was positively associated with Blacks’ county-level CVD deaths (β = .074, p = .036). Conclusions This evidence suggests that across racial groups, holding racial prejudice is associated with CVD mortality risk for both the prejudiced and the stigmatized groups. Future research should verify the reliability of this potential public health effect with additional work explicating moderators and mediators to inform surveillance and interventions.

Destigmatization and Its Imbalanced Effects in Labor Markets

Destigmatization is an understudied social process in which the negative outcomes for a previously stigmatized group improve. We theorize that during a period of destigmatization, the effects of stigma persist more strongly for people stigmatized by association than for those directly stigmatized. We propose that this occurs because, during periods of destigmatization, conscious prejudice has diminished but nonconscious prejudice remains, so people correct for their explicit biases toward individuals with the stigmatizing trait but are unaware of their ongoing implicit prejudice toward those stigmatized by association. Our evidence comes from archival data on individual employment in film during the cold war years in Hollywood. It shows that as the stigma of being on an anticommunist blacklist weakened, the employment penalty for being a coworker of a blacklisted artist was greater than the penalty for actually having been on the blacklist itself. A supplemental experiment, designed to address the limitations of archival data, shows the same imbalanced employment penalties in another stigma currently undergoing destigmatization (that of physical disability). Paradoxically, as stigmas recede, harmful effects persist more for associates of stigmatized individuals than for the stigmatized themselves. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, organizations.

What Do Teenagers and Young Adults Think and Feel About Their Peers with Cancer? A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Explicit and Implicit Prejudices

The social stigma of cancer is a powerful source of stereotyping and prejudice against people affected by oncological disorders. Two cross-sectional studies attempted to (1) provide a formal and content characteristic of the stereotype of teenage cancer patient and (2) analyze explicit and implicit prejudice against them. In the first study, 2,370 middle school students proposed open-ended descriptions and quantified 50 attributes representing physical appearance, cognitive, task-oriented, social, and emotional functioning of the teenage cancer patient. In the second study, 207 undergraduate students of education completed the Implicit Association Test, which contrasted the teenage cancer patient with a teenager as a reference category. Content analysis of 11,191 open-ended descriptions and exploratory factor analysis of 50 attributes showed that teenage cancer patients were characterized in the emotional, social, and physical appearance domain. The IAT revealed that teenagers with cancer automatically induced moderate negative prejudice not linked with similarly negative explicit prejudice. Negative explicit and implicit prejudice suggests that teenagers with cancer may be omitted or disfavored by classmates and teachers, therefore they require special treatment in school and out-of-school environments. The findings and their practical implications were discussed in light of theories of stigmatization, stereotyping, and prejudice against cancer patients.

Prejudice drives exogenous attention to outgroups

Exogenous attention allows the automatic detection of relevant stimuli and the reorientation of our current focus of attention towards them. Faces from an ethnic outgroup tend to capture exogenous attention to a greater extent than faces from an ethnic ingroup. We explored whether prejudice toward the outgroup, rather than lack of familiarity, is driving this effect. Participants (N = 76) performed a digit categorization task while distractor faces were presented. Faces belonged to (i) a prejudiced outgroup, (ii) a non-prejudiced outgroup and (iii) their ingroup. Half of the faces were previously habituated in order to increase their familiarity. Reaction times, accuracy and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to index exogenous attention to distractor faces. Additionally, different indexes of explicit and implicit prejudice were measured, the latter being significantly greater towards prejudiced outgroup. N170 amplitude was greater to prejudiced outgroup—regardless of their habituation status—than to both non-prejudiced outgroup and ingroup faces and was associated with implicit prejudice measures. No effects were observed at the behavioral level. Our results show that implicit prejudice, rather than familiarity, is under the observed attention-related N170 effects and that this ERP component may be more sensitive to prejudice than behavioral measures under certain circumstances.

The Bidirectional Causal Relation Between Implicit Stereotypes and Implicit Prejudice

Although stereotypes and prejudice are commonly regarded as conceptually distinct but related constructs, previous research remains silent on the processes underlying their relation. Applying the balance-congruity principle to the concepts (a) group, (b) valence, and (c) attribute, we argue that the valence of attributes contained in a group-stereotype shapes evaluations of the group, while prejudice toward a group influences which attributes are stereotypically associated with the group. Using fictitious (Experiments 1 and 3) and real (Experiments 2 and 4) groups, the current studies demonstrate that (a) experimentally induced changes in the valence of semantic attributes associated with a group (stereotypes) influence implicit prejudice toward that group (Experiments 1 and 2), and (b) experimentally induced changes in the valence of a group (prejudice) influence implicit stereotyping of that group (Experiments 3 and 4). These findings demonstrate a bidirectional causal relation between prejudice and stereotypes.